THE MOM&POP STORE

How the Unsung Heroes of the American Economy Are Surviving and Thriving
By ROBERT SPECTOR

Walker & Company

Copyright © 2009 Robert Spector
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1605-7

Contents

Introduction...............................................................1
1. Working-Class Hero......................................................13
2. Perth Amboy.............................................................31
3. Zeyde (Grandfather): Founder of Our Family Business.....................49
4. The Rise of the Merchant................................................67
5. Working Alongside Mom & Pop.............................................89
6. Independence............................................................117
7. Passion and Persistence.................................................138
8. Reinvention.............................................................151
9. There Goes the Neighborhood.............................................171
10. Connection.............................................................197
11. Hard Time..............................................................s 216
12. If Your Neighbor Has It to Sell .......................................237
Acknowledgments............................................................269
Notes......................................................................271
Selected Bibliography......................................................277
Index......................................................................281

Introduction

The mom & pop store—the small, independent trader—embodies our most basic and enduring commercial bond. From the wool merchants in the markets of King Hammurabi's Babylon in 2000 B.C., to the stand-alone bakeries in eleventh-century France, to the espresso shops on modern-day Main Street, trade—the exchange of goods or currency between buyer and seller—is the foundation of civilized society.

Retail, as the writer Christopher Caldwell noted, "is the exciting place where the economic order and the social order meet."

Not that any of these thoughts ever crossed my mind as a teenager slicing liverwurst in my father's butcher shop in the farmers' market in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. All I could think about was getting as far away as I could from the boiled ham, chop meat, pigs' feet, calves' brains, ham hocks, and head cheese that surrounded me. Never once, as I stuffed scraps of raw meat and fat into the grinder to make chop meat, did I think about my contribution to the "economic order and the social order," nor did I appreciate the fact that I was sharing this experience with Bob Dylan, whose first job was sweeping the floor of his father's Zimmerman Electric & Furniture store in Hibbing, Minnesota; or Colin Powell, who worked throughout high school at Sickser's Furniture in the Bronx; or Margaret Thatcher, who made change in her father's grocery store in Grantham, Lincolnshire; or Paul Newman, who once ran his father's sporting goods store in Cleveland, Ohio; or Tony Bennett, Warren Buffett, or Maya Angelou. I didn't know that being the son of a butcher placed me in the company of William Shakespeare, Nat King Cole, Marcel Marceau, Antonfn Dvorak, John Harvard, John Jacob Astor, Julian Schnabel, and Paul "Big Pauly" Castellano, the late head of the Gambino crime family.

It wasn't until I was almost fifty years old that I finally comprehended how those hours spent behind the counter had shaped my life and granted me the practical wisdom that has guided me ever since. At the time, I didn't even think I was paying attention.

I eventually learned to fully appreciate the impact that the shop had on my extended family (over four decades, Spector's Meat Market directly or indirectly benefited seventeen relatives), and on the lives of our customers. The T-bone steak that my father trimmed, the salami that my uncle sliced, and the rye bread that my mother sold found their way to the dinner tables of homes all over our community. A little bit of the Spectors, as it were, right there on your plate. This was brought home to me during the research of this book, when a high school classmate of my sister Sandra wrote a poem called "Memories" for their class reunion. Included in the lines written by Ann Romeo Kulick, who lived across the street from the farmers' market, was "There was Spector's, with rye bread in hand."

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Category Killers about the impact of so-called big-box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Staples, Best Buy, Petco, and so forth on our consumer culture. Back then, when people asked me what project I was working on, my answer, "category killers," produced a blank stare. What's a category killer? But when I told people I was working on a book about mom & pop stores, practically all of them reacted with a smile because everyone knows what a mom & pop store is. "Oh, my grandfather had an Italian bakery," one person said. "My uncle was a butcher," said another, or "My parents had a tailor shop."

Almost everyone had a personal story about his or her favorite mom & pop store. My doctor, Bill Mitchell, told me about the time when he was eight years old and his mother sent him to the nearby corner grocery store in his Chicago neighborhood to get a quart of milk. This was in the 1950s, when milk came in glass bottles. Bill bought the milk, walked out of the grocery store, slipped on a wet spot, and dropped the bottle onto the sidewalk—shattering glass at his feet. As he began to cry (literally over spilled milk), the owner heard him and rushed out of the store to see what was the matter. He gave young Bill another bottle of milk, free of charge. Fifty years after that experience, Bill recalled it as if it were yesterday.

Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks Coffee, told me that when he was a young boy in Brooklyn, "I would go to the butcher store with my mom, and the butcher would show her chickens. My mother would say, 'No, I don't want that one; yes, I want that one.' The butcher placed a lot of importance on doing things right for her. After we were done, he'd always say, 'I'll see you next week, Mrs. Schultz.' You want to go into a place where you're appreciated, known, and respected."

Growing up, my favorite store was Penn's Confectionary, the little shop owned by the parents of my childhood friend Sharon Penn. Penn's was located a couple of blocks from my house, in the middle of a modest, tree-lined residential neighborhood. The shop carried a little bit of everything—candy, comic books, magazines, greeting cards, and Spalding High-Bounce rubber balls, which were ideal for stickball or stoopball games. Penn's centerpiece was a classic soda fountain counter where customers devoured ice cream sodas, fudge sundaes, banana splits, milkshakes, and egg creams. By the time Sharon, the oldest child, was fourteen, her father thought nothing of leaving her to run the store by herself for three or four hours at a time. On many a summer day, I'd dribble my basketball down our street, then over to the corner of Lewis Street and Brighton Avenue, to Penn's, where I'd park myself on a stool at the counter and keep Sharon company as we talked about girls (me) and boys (her). In between the times she was waiting on customers, she'd fix me a chocolate malted milk shake (with a raw egg, always), and let me read, for free, the latest Superman and Batman comic books.

It turns out I was having more fun than Sharon was.

"When I was fourteen, I never thought about what an awesome responsibility it was to be left to run the store by myself," Sharon Penn Sigmund told me. "My father was so interested in getting out of there, if I was nine years old he would have left me there."

And yet, her time working in the shop taught her valuable lessons.

"I knew that, even at fourteen, I was capable of running the store for three or four hours on my own. My mother taught me to always be organized and neat. Always recheck everything. Later in life I did surgical scheduling, where you had to be precise, because having the right equipment in the operating room was a matter of life or death."

"Mom & pop store" is such a familiar expression that it seems to have been around forever, but it's a modern term. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage to the December 20, 1962, issue of a publication called the Listener, which was distributed by the BBC in Great Britain: "These mom & pop stores certainly do not love the supermarkets."

(By the way, they still don't.)

Over the years, the term has gotten a bad rap. Businesses are belittled as being just "mom & pop operations"—small, insignificant, outdated. It's easy to understand why many people who run mom & pop stores don't want their businesses described that way because they feel it diminishes what they do.

Some owners of small, independent retail businesses reject the term because their stores are not owned by a mom and a pop. So when I use the term "mom & pop," I also mean mom & mom, mom & daughter, brother & brother, business partner & business partner, and life partner & life partner. To me, it's all mom & pop.

Mom & pop stores are not about something small; they are about something big. Ninety percent of all U.S. businesses are family owned or controlled. They are important not only for the food, drink, clothing, and tools they sell us, but also for providing us with intellectual stimulation, social interaction, and connection to our communities. We must have mom & pop stores because we are social animals. We crave to be a part of the marketplace. Before the bursting of the Internet-stock bubble of the 1990s, the so-called experts were telling us that we no longer needed brick-and-mortar shops because we were all going to be buying everything online, in our pajamas, at two in the morning. (Were these the same people who predicted the "paperless office" and the "thirty-hour workweek"?) They didn't realize that human beings are drawn to the market, the agora, the heart of town. We will always have mom & pop stores because we will always need them. Mom & pop stores have endured every new retail concept that's been thrown at them: department stores, chain stores, discount stores, mail-order catalogs, and the Internet. They are masters at adapting to their changing environment. That's why, after the apocalypse, the only survivors will be cockroaches and mom & pop stores.

With this book, I intend to reappropriate the term "mom & pop" to its rightful, honorable place.

The men and women who run these enterprises are heroes and heroines; they are authentic entrepreneurs who create, organize, operate, and assume the risk for their business ventures. That's why in order to run a mom & pop business you have to be a jack-of-all-trades (or a jill)—financier, buyer, merchandiser, bookkeeper, bill collector, adviser, referee, good neighbor, and community pillar.

The owner of a successful mom & pop store has to have more talents than the CEO of a Fortune 500 company—plus more integrity. Lora Lewis, who owns and operates Hotwire Online Coffeehouse in Seattle, told me that all her new hires are given a sheet of paper that lists pertinent contact information about the business. Under "human resources" is Lora's name and cell phone number. Under "payroll" is her name and cell phone number. The same thing goes for "schedule changes" and every other relevant topic. "They all laugh, thank goodness," said Lora, but the point is still made. After all is said and done, it's all her responsibility.

This book is no elegy for the shops that have relocated to the big Main Street in the sky. Their passing is a part of life, just like the death of a person or a pet. About a third of family-owned businesses survive to the second generation, and 16 percent reach the third generation. Only 3 percent make it to the fourth generation or further. Small independent retailers go out of business for many reasons: aging owners, family squabbles, absence of a successor, burnout, competition from large chain stores, new highways that bypass downtowns, ups and downs of local economies, evolving tastes and needs of their neighborhoods, changing demographics, urban renewal, loss of lease, hikes in rent, poor planning. Some indie traders are like shooting stars, meant to exist for a brief time; others persevere and become Pizza Hut or Nordstrom or the Geek Squad.

Newspapers often run retail obituaries about longtime stores or restaurants that are closing their doors. Here's a sampling of headlines that I've collected over the years:

IT'S LAST CALL FOR GUINAN'S PUB AND STORE A COFFEE SHOP CLOSES, AND THERE'LL BE SAD SONGS DOWN AT MORY'S CLOSING TIME FOR DINER THAT FED THE BODY AND SOUL A DELI DESTINATION, NOW A PASTRAMI-SCENTED MEMORY TOUGH TIMES FOR LOCAL INDIE BOOKSTORES

We bemoan the fact that the place is closing, but we can't remember the last time we gave the place our business. For three decades, a dear friend of mine was a very successful retailer in a major city, but because of changes in the local demand for his specialized product category, he was forced to close his store, which was a wellknown, longtime landmark in his city. The local newspaper wrote the obligatory article about the store's demise, and customers came by to lament what had happened, and to buy a few items as mementos. My friend was gratified by the outpouring, but, he asked me, "Where were those people when I needed them?"

If we want independent retailers to stay in business, we have to patronize them. It's that simple. It's always been that simple. That thought was reinforced in me in 2006 at the New Jersey Information Center in the Newark Public Library, where I was staring at microfiche copies of the classified city directories, looking for businesses my grandfather had been involved in, before he and my father and uncle opened their butcher shop in Perth Amboy in the 1930s. On the introductory page of the 1930 directory, the publisher listed several reasons for buying a copy, but the payoff was the final reason: "If your neighbor has it to sell, give him your business. Like consideration from your neighbor adds prosperity to both."

In other words, if you've got something I need, I'll buy from you, and vice versa. That's what makes the world go 'round. Mom & pop stores are about neighborhood, about community, about my taking care of you and your taking care of me.

Today in communities, big and small, mom & pop stores are more relevant than ever. They're not disappearing. Look around you. They are everywhere: the neighborhood grocer, butcher, dry cleaner, and barber. Today's mom & pop store is a trendy women's boutique that reflects the fashion vision of a former department store sportswear buyer. Today's mom & pop store is a hip bakery started by an erstwhile hedge fund trader, who wanted to capitalize on grandma's recipe for cupcakes.

A surprising marketing strategy shows just how relevant mom & pop stores are today. They were a key component in a 2008 advertising campaign by the Atlantic magazine that was aimed at grabbing the attention of young New York media buyers—the people who decide where to spend the advertising budget of their clients. Part of the strategy of the Atlantic was to advertise in unconventional venues, such as neighborhood restaurants, bakeries, and bodegas where the media buyers ate and shopped. For example, in a bakery showcase, between the corn muffins and the currant biscuits, there was a scone with a little sign that posed the provocative question, "Is war a sport?" along with the magazine's Web site and slogan. A spokesman for the ad agency was quoted as saying that the restaurants and shops were ideal locations to get the media buyers' attention because they are "places where people's brains are most at rest."

Mom & pop stores define the neighborhood. Jane Jacobs, who wrote about my old Greenwich Village neighborhood in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pointed out that it's not the big retail chains that provide the characters on the streets of a neighborhood; it's the small businesses that do that. The neighborhood characters are people like Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray's Cheese Shop on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village; John Nese, who runs Galco's Old World Grocery in Los Angeles; Willie Earl Bates, who revived the legendary Four Way Restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, and all the other men and women you will meet in these pages. Each of them has invested blood, sweat, tears, time, passion, and dollars, and each has, in the process, created a unique neighborhood place.

Mom & pop stores continue to be a part of the immigrant entrepreneurial experience in ways that combine the old with the new. I fondly recall riding a bus down Hillside Avenue in Queens with my book editor and marveling at the veritable "United Nations" of mom & pop stores on that bustling street in the most diverse community on the planet. It didn't matter whether the shop owners were from Ghana, Vietnam, or Ukraine or whether they were running restaurants, dry cleaners, or bakeries. Once they reached the shores of America, they instinctively understood the part they could play in their neighborhood.

Small independent traders are the most direct line to the people. In an article in the New York Times headlined HIP-HOP BETWEEN THE COLD CUTS, resourceful Latino hip-hop, dance, and rock bands talked about bypassing the big music stores and Internet music sites by selling their CDs at the corner bodega and the local barbershop. And one of the biggest recent hit shows on Broadway was the rap-and-salsa-inspired musical In the Heights, which centered its action on a bodega in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

(Continues...)


Excerpted from THE MOM&POP STORE by ROBERT SPECTOR Copyright © 2009 by Robert Spector. Excerpted by permission of Walker & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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